Monday, September 28, 2009

Every February, global warming comes to Wenatchee, Washington. It gets 2 degrees warmer than the nearest town Waterville, WA. The picture below is of the average of the daily temperature differences for each day in the year, averaged from 1931 to 2008. You can see that there is a rise of about 2 degrees F each February/March, meaning that something is making Wenatchee warmer during that season. What it is, I don't know but it is a real problem because global warming is only supposed to have warmed the world by 1.1 degree, but Wenatchee warms that much each February.

Clearly this is a problem for claims that we can know what the climate is doing.

Note that the red bar represents 100 years of purported global warming. The world is said to have warmed by 1.1 deg in 100 years. But Wenatchee warms by 2 degrees F every February. It experiences 100 years of global warming each year.

In reality the noise in the data is so great that there is absolutely no way to determine what the temperature of the earth is doing. Only true believers believe that the temperature data shows that the earth is warming. Realists look at the data that I have shown and know that this data is utter crap.

A technical note. Elevational differences cause temperature differences. This can be corrected by what is called the adiabatic correction, 3.56 deg F/1000 feet. These data have been corrected to the lower elevation.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

I have been examining the average of each day's temperature difference for two closely spaced towns for the entire time that temperatures have been taken at the two nearby stations. Again I will look at the lunacy found in the record of Montevideo and Milan, Minnesota. When I take the average temperature difference for each day in February from 1894 to 2008 I find the average temperature difference is as seen in the following chart.

The question I have is why is the 105 year average temperature difference for Feb 6 1.7 deg F different than the average temperature difference for Feb 8th? It seems to me that there shouldn't be that large of a temperature difference. Once again, if one believes the thermometer record, one is believing in a lunatic data set.

I also would contend that the fact that for 105 years Montevideo has been hotter for 26 out of 28 days on average for February, clearly says that the data is attrocious. Such biases should not exist for towns only 16 miles apart. Whatever we are measuring, it isn't global temperature.

It is modern myth that CO2 is melting the Arctic sea ice. No doubt many people will take immediate offence at the mere title of this post but they would do well to listen to the data before they jump. CO2 is supposed to heat the earth's atmosphere and then would melt the ice from above. The atmosphere can't get past the ice to warm the water below so the only logical conclusion is that a warm atmosphere should melt the ice from above.

But what is happening is the Arctic ice is melting from below due to warm waters that normally are about 100-200 m below the surface. I am going to show that due to a change in the winds, the Arctic ocean became more salty (salinization). The increase in salinity caused the underlying deeper waters to come into contact with the ice above, which melts the Arctic ice from below. Unless one can demonstrate that the wind change is due to global warming, one can't claim that CO2 is melting the Arctic ic.

Let's start by looking at the vertical temperature profile of the Arctic ocean. The surface layer, the layer in which the ice floats, is in general is fresher than the warm Atlantic sea water below.

Note that about 200 meters beneath the sea surface, the water temperature is 2 deg C--well above the melting point. If that heat can get up to the surficial layer, past the fresh water, it would melt the ice. Since fresh water is less dense than salt water, the density difference is what keeps the warm water from the ice. Now, the halocline, the layer of fresh water is about 50-100 meters thick. The ice above is only about 3 meters thick--people think the Arctic sea ice is hundreds of feet thick but it isn't (http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay.wadhams.html). What happened in the Arctic is that the halocline, the freshwater layer has been destroyed, or significantly reduced, and that has allowed heat from below to rise beneath the ice, melting it.

Here is how this happened. Below is a comparison of the wind patterns in the 70s and 80s vs, the late 80s and 90s.

The left picture is 1979-1988; the right is 1989-1997. The big high pressure cell (red) present in the earlier times is gone in the later times. And that has had a big impact on the freshwater flow in the surficial waters of the Arctic ocean.

"This study was motivated by observations of significant salinification of the upper Eurasian Basin that began around 1989. Observational data and modelling results provide evidence that increased arctic atmospheric cyclonicity in the 1990s resulted in a dramatic increase in the salinity in the Laptev Sea and Eurasian Basin. Two mechanisms account for the Laptev Sea salinization: eastward diversion of Russian rivers, and increased brine formation due to enhanced ice production in numerous leads in the Laptev Sea ice cover. These two mechanisms are approximately the same intensity and are linked to changes in wind patterns. The resulting Laptev Sea salinity anomaly was then advected to the central Eurasian Basin. The strong salinization over the Eurasian Basin altered the formation of cold halocline waters, weakened vertical stratification, and released heat from the cold halocline layer upward. Our analysis suggests that local processes in the Laptev Sea may have a dramatic basin-wide impact on the thermohaline structure and circulation of the Arctic Ocean." Johnson, M. A., and I. V. Polyakov, The Laptev Sea as a source for recent Arctic Ocean salinity changes, Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 2017-2020, 2001

The impact of that increased salinization is that the ice is no longer protected from the warmer waters below. Johnson and Polyakov state:

"The replacement of fresh surface waters with more saline waters reduced vertical stratification and increased heat flux, releasing heat from cold halocline layer to upper layers of the Eurasian Basin. The corresponding heat flux increase for the 1989-1997 period is as much as 3 W/ m-2 (Figure 4B) in this region, comparable to the change in heat flux over the Lomonosov Ridge and Amundsen Basin computed from SCICEX'95 data and a 1-D mixing model [Steele and Boyd, 1998]." Johnson, M. A., and I. V. Polyakov, The Laptev Sea as a source for recent Arctic Ocean salinity changes, Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 2017-2020, 2001

Swift et al, say the same thing--that the heat from below is warming the ice above, melting it.

"The halocline is the principal density structure of the Arctic Ocean, separating the cold surface mixed layer from the warm Atlantic layer that lies below about 200 m. The climatic importance of the halocline is well recognized [e.g., Aagaard et al., 1981]. Some observations have suggested that regionally the halocline has thinned dramatically during the past 10-15 years, possibly sufficiently to increase the upward heat flux to the sea surface and its ice cover [Steele and Boyd, 1998]. Other recent work has linked large and rapid changes in the properties of halocline waters to shelf processes, including the melting of sea ice on the Barents shelf [Woodgate et al., 2001] and increased freezing in the Laptev Sea [Johnson and Polyakov, 2001]. There is in any event ample justification to seek evidence of earlier halocline changes similar to those during the 1990s." Swift, J. H., K. Aagaard, L. Timokhov, and E. G. Nikiforov (2005), Long-term variability of Arctic Ocean waters: Evidence from a reanalysis of the EWG data set, J. Geophys. Res., 110, C03012 ftp://odf.ucsd.edu/pub/jswift/2004JC002312.pdf p.8,9

Swift et al looked at records of temperature over the past 50 years looking for previous warming periods. They show a very interesting plot which shows the temperature structure of the Arctic Ocean over time. This picture is from the Nansen Basin.

You can see that there were warm periods in the underlying water three times during the past, the early 1950s, the mid 1960s and the early 1970s.What is happening in the Arctic is not unprecedented. Shoot, 5000 years ago, all the permafrost around the arctic was melted.

" We find that beginning about 1976, most of the upper Arctic Ocean became significantly saltier, possibly related to thinning of the arctic ice cover. There are also indications that a more local upper ocean salinity increase in the Eurasian Basin about 1989 may not have originated on the shelf, as had been suggested earlier. In addition to the now well-established warming of the Atlantic layer during the early 1990s, there was a similar cyclonically propagating warm event during the 1950s. More remarkable, however, was a pervasive Atlantic layer warming throughout most of the Arctic Ocean from 1964–1969, possibly related to reduced vertical heat loss associated with increased upper ocean stratification. A cold period prevailed during most of the 1970s and 1980s, with several very cold events appearing to originate near the Kara and Laptev shelves. Finally, we find that the silicate maximum in the central Arctic Ocean halocline eroded abruptly in the mid-1980s, demonstrating that the redistribution of Pacific waters and the warming of the Atlantic layer reported from other observations during the 1990s were distinct events separated in time by perhaps 5 years. We have made the entire data set publicly available." Swift, J. H., K. Aagaard, L. Timokhov, and E. G. Nikiforov (2005), Long-term variability of Arctic Ocean waters: Evidence from a reanalysis of the EWG data set, J. Geophys. Res., 110, C03012

Now as long ago as 1998 it has been known that the warm waters beneath the ice was in direct contact with the ice, yet the global warming hysteriacs continue to ignore the scientific data

" Changes are also seen in other halocline types and in the Atlantic Water layer heat content and depth. Since the cold halocline layer insulates the surface layer (and thus the overlying sea ice) from the heat contained in the Atlantic Water layer, this should have profound effects on the surface energy and mass balance of sea ice in this region. Using a simple mixing model, we calculate maximum ice-ocean heat fluxes of 1–3 W m−2 in the Eurasian Basin, where during SCICEX'95 the surface layer lay in direct contact with the underlying Atlantic Water layer." Steele, M., and T. Boyd (1998), Retreat of the cold halocline layer in the Arctic Ocean, J. Geophys. Res., 103(C5), 10,419–10,435

Remember that the warm underlying Atlantic water is in direct contact with the ice above and that this is due to the salinization of the Arctic water. Here is the history of the salinization of the Arctic.

Clearly about the time that the Arctic ice began to melt, the sea became more salty. CO2 is not melting the ice; the underlying warm water coming into contact with the ice from beneath is what is melting the Arctic ice.

Why do the global warming hysteriacs NEVER, EVER tell you this? Is it because they simply are pushing a political agenda rather than real science?

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Minnesota again--yes, Montevideo and Milan yet again. I aligned the daily temperature differences for these two towns for 105 years of data. Then I averaged each day--Jan 1 had its average temperature from 1894-2008, Jan 2 had a separate average, etc ad nauseum. The average daily temperature difference between Montevideo and Milan Minnesota is shown in the first picture.

One can immediately see that Montevideo has been warmer than Milan during most of the years and was more warm during the winter than during the summer. This implies either a cooling at Milan or a heating in Montevideo each winter since 1894.There is no way to tell which is the case.

Now lets add a 30 day running average of the average daily temperature difference for each day. This means we take 15 days before and 15 days after and average them. and we do that for each day of the year. That gives the red curve below.

Now, most people will say that we can use the average daily temperature over this long a period of time to remove the bias for each day and get the temperature back to what it should be. But that won't work. Let's subtract the 1894-2008 bias for each individual day from the data for 2 periods of time, the 2000-2008 time period and the 1968-1975 time period. The temperature differences for these two time periods are shown below.

You can see that Montevideo is warmer than Milan from 2000-2008 but colder from 1968-1975. That presents a problem if we want to use the average to correct the daily temperature differences for these two time periods.

First using the raw data for the correction factor (meaning each day's 1894-2008 average temperature is used as the correction factor) we find that we don't make the two towns read the same temperature.

All we have done with this is make 2000-2008 more negative and 1968-1975 less positive. But we have not made the two periods of time give us what we expect they should have--the same temperature.

If we use the 30 day running average as the correction the same thing happens.

The only way to correct this and make these two towns give up nearly the same temperature is to have a temporally variant correction, and that is not very useful because it would be doing nothing more than making the record be what we think it ought to be. And that is what the current system does with its addition of heat to the modern record as it is corrected at GISS. If it is scientifically invalid for them to make the temperature record be what they think it should be (a warming record) it would be equally wrong for my side to make the temperature record say what I think it should say. If one can't correct the temperature record with solid methodologies, the only logical conclusion is that the record can't be corrected. It is uncorrectable.

Last night I posted the 2000-2008 temperature comparison of two Minnesota towns, Montevideo and Milan which are only 16 miles apart. A friend today commented that the bias was entirely negative and he wondered if a lake near Milan was the cause. I don't think that is the case. Why? Because the seasonality is seen in the years 1968 to 1975 and the overall bias is above zero. Below is the daily temperature difference between the two towns with a 180-day running average applied.

The amount of temperature difference seen in the 180-day average is very large, 2.5 deg F. Some of the individual days have more than 10 degree F differences. Clearly the raw data is highly inaccurate and yet this kind of terrible data is being used to scare you into being worried about the world overheating.

Whatever one wants to believe, with this data no one can know if the world has warmed or not.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

I have been examining some of the temperature records from a different perspective--the periodicities in the temperature differences between two nearby towns. Tonight I think I would like to look at Montevideo, MN and Milan, MN two towns separated by 16 miles of highway. One would think that they would give the same temperature. But something is going on to make the temperature difference vary with the time of year. You can see that from 2000 to 2007 mostly each winter the temperature difference between the two towns was small while in the summers it was greater.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

I have been in a discussion with a determined global warming advocate. During our discussion I pointed out that the temperature difference between Brookhaven City, MS and Monticello, MS during the 1960s showed a seasonal variation. You can see this at this place.. But below is the pertinant picture.

The above photo is a chart of the temperature difference between these two towns. I wondered if the average temperature difference on, say Oct 30 was bigger or smaller than the average temperature difference on June 1. So....

I decided to align ALL the years from 1948 to 2002 and average the temperature difference for each day in the year. That gives me 366 daily averages and shows up any seasonal bias that lasts throughout the entire temperature series. The thing I am interested in is are there any days or periods of time that are systematically warmer or colder in one of the two towns.

In the chart below, the first value is the average temperature difference between Brookhaven City, MS and Monticello, MS for January 1. The second point is for January 2, and so on and so forth.

If the temperature is being measured properly, one should see a random distribution about the x-axis. But that isn't what we see.

Notice that in the fall (after day 260, which is about Sept 16, there is a strong bias on the days, in which Brookhaven is warmer than Monticello. That difference lasts until about Dec 1. This is the average difference for the ENTIRE temperature record.

If one looks at 10 year periods one gets a different picture. The biases change from decade to decade, but they are still biases.

In the 1960s the bias not only included the Fall but the Spring as well.

This view of the data is quite disturbing. It means that the data going into global warming studies is totally screwed up.

Let's look at the same thing for Okemah, OK vs Okmulgee OK. It looks like:

One can see that the bias here rises in the Fall and Winter but is least in the summer--even though the spread is noisy.

The WCC-3 conference took place in Geneva, Switzerland. One of the session, on climate prediction was quite interesting. I have downloaded the powerpoints and listened to the audio. The powerpoints can be found at MeehlPalmerLatif

I am going to talk about Palmer and Latif's talk. Palmer discussed the resolution issue and the problems global climate models have. The first one is one of bias. He said this about the biases in the climate models.

"Now these biases , unfortunately can be as large as the signal. We can take these biases out with these empirical post processing corrections. But anyone who knows anything about nonlinear dynamics and the climate system is a nonlinear system will know that this kind of post processing correction methodology is not a reliable procedure. So this raises some of the difficulties we have." T.N. Palmer, Seasonal to Interannual Prediction" WCC-3

So, we use an admittedly unreliable procedure to make the models output meaningful???? That sounds like mental mas..., well you know.

Palmer then speaks about the failure of the climatological predictions to predict the horribly heat wave and drought Europe experienced in 2003. The models now, he says have been entirely revamped and can now retrodict the summer of 2003. How wonderful that is. We were told how good the models were in 2001, 2002, 2003 and they failed to predict the event. But with about 4 years of revamping the models they can now retrodict what happened! He lists all the things that were not in the 2003 model which are now there. What he doesn't do is predict what will need to be revamped in the models to make it work in the future.

He then speaks about the grid size problem of models. The best climate model has a grid size of 20 km shown below. This is good but even this scale can't handle local cloud conditions.

Most models are around 80 km grid spacing and the world looks like this.

The models they began to scare us with are actually about 4x wose than the above.

Mojib Latif then gave a talk about decadal predictions by climate models. Afterall, if a model is correct, it should predict things on a decade level. They don't.

Latif compared two models with the observations. You can see that the errors in the models are bad. Some models, Latif says, have errors of up to 10 degrees and are not very representative or reality.

For the Atlantic dipole, the models predict too high of a temperature.

And models can't predict the rainfall any better than your local weatherman. On the right is the observed rainfall along the Gulf Stream. In the middle is a global climate model with a 50 km grid size--near state of the art. You can see that the rainfall amount is wrong and the place where the heaviest rainfall falls is also wrong. The last view is of the smoothed model, which loses all resolution and really isn't predicting anything--yet it is a 2009 model.

All the doom and gloom forecasts of climate heating come from the models. And the models can't get much really right when looking backwards. That should cause one to pause when one wants to predict forward.

One final picture from the conference shows the sunspot irradiance which is now lower than it has been for a long time. This effect as well should cool the earth unless the sun starts making sunspots.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

I had an old friend, a guy I have known for about 30 years, go to Hudson Bay this summer, in late June. He sent me some pictures which he said I could use (with some restrictions). The thing that he said was that Hudson Bay had remained frozen much longer this year than it normally does.

Euroinvestor said:

18-08-2009 - 14:00Summer Sea Ice Good News for Hudson Bay Polar BearsCHURCHILL, Canada, August 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Scientists have confirmed what a Tundra Buggy(R) business in Churchill is witnessing: that due to colder-than-usual subarctic weather this year, healthier polar bears are being spotted along the west Hudson Bay coast. "We are going to have a great opportunity this autumn to fulfill our Tundra Buggy Adventure guests' expectations of snow, ice and healthy polar bears," says John Gunter, General Manager of Frontiers North Adventures in Churchill. "The last couple weeks, as polar bears have been making their way from ice to land for the summer, we've seen from our Tundra Buggies numerous big, healthy polar bears in Manitoba Conservation's Churchill Wildlife Management Area, east of Churchill."

"This year there is more ice on average," explains Dr. David Barber, a Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science and the director of the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba. "Hudson Bay in particular has seen a very cold winter and essentially a late spring." http://www.euroinvestor.co.uk/news/story.aspx?id=10583035

Below is a picture of Hudson bay in June.

And from the Canadian Free Press:

Tue Aug 18, 4:26 PM

By Chinta Puxley, The Canadian Press

WINNIPEG - A cold summer in many areas of the country may have meant fewer barbecues and camping trips this year, but lower temperatures have been a boon for the beleaguered Hudson Bay polar bears.

Experts say the summer sea ice has lasted longer than it has in years, which has given the region's more than 1,000 bears extra time to hunt, feed and raise healthy cubs. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/090818/national/polar_bear_sea_ice_1

Below is another view of Hudson Bay. The Ithaca ran aground in 1961. Today it sits stranded in frozen water along the shore of Hudson Bay.

Those who believe that the Arctic is melting should think about Hudson Bay this year when we have no sunspots. The last time we had no sunspots (1600-1700), Europe froze up. Google the Maunder Minimum.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

It has been my experience that whenever one criticizes CO2 as the sole cause of global warming, if you are not a climatologist, everyone tells you to sit down, shut up and listen to the climatological experts. But even if you say what I have been saying, they won't listen--violating the belief system of the Anthropogenic Global Warming advocates elicits lots of criticism--most of it unwarrented.

Ok, for this post, I will listen to the experts. The UN had a conference on climate change last week in Geneva, Switzerland. New Scientist reported on the conference, focusing on a speech given by Mojib Latif, one of the IPCC authors. Below is a quotation from the article. Note how Latif has to be sure to tell everyone he isn't a skeptic. I know why he does that--if people think you doubt the almighty God of global warming, they will quit listening to you.

"We could be about to enter one or even two decades of cooler temperatures, according to one of the world's top climate modellers."

"'People will say this is global warming disappearing,' Mojib Latif told more than 1500 climate scientists gathered at the UN's World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, last week. "I am not one of the sceptics. However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.'" Fred Pearce, "World will 'cool for the next decade'" New Scientist, Sept 12, 2009, p. 10.

I will bold an important point in the following quote.

"Latif predicts that in the next few years a natural cooling trend will dominate the warming caused by humans. the cooling would be down to cyclical changes in the atmosphere and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO)."

"Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, Latif said the NAO was probably responsible for some of the strong warming seen around the globe in the past three decades. 'But how much? The jury is still out,' he told the conference." Fred Pearce, "World will 'cool for the next decade'" New Scientist, Sept 12, 2009, p. 10.

The article continues

"Another favourite climate belief was overturned when Pope warned the conference that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming."Fred Pearce, "World will 'cool for the next decade'" New Scientist, Sept 12, 2009, p. 10.

Let's listen to Lenny Smith, one of the writers of global climate models. In answer to the question, should we believe the models, he says

"Yes. If modellers are asked for detailed forecasts about what will happen, say, in south-east England in 2060, some feel that it's their job to provide the best available information. They then report whatever today's biggest computers spit out, even if they know those results are not robust."

"Suppose different models give simulations for precipitation in 2060, ranging from 20 per cent less rainfall to 40 per cent more rainfall. The average is a 10 per cent increase, but is that value of any use to decision-makers? We don't know how to turn those numbers into a trustworthy probability forecast. Maybe we should just accept we don't know the details."“Fred Pearce, “Making Room for Uncertainty,” New Scientist, dec 6, 2008, p. 42

It is sad that the AGW advocates are not listening to their own experts.

And when one realizes that various models suggest different things, one should look at the spread in global warming predicted by various global climate models.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

There is a general view that urban stations are the only stations affected by the modern heat-emitting world. Rural stations are claimed to be exempt from all this thermal pollution. For that reason, Thomas Peterson wrote a 2003 article looking at the heat from urban and rual stations. He declared that urban stations were no hotter than rural stations and thus the urban heat island effect was not a big deal. This would be a quite interesting and remarkable result. Everyone talks about the urban heat island and here is a guy saying it is negligible. Peterson used data from 1989 to 1991 in his analysis.

At first glance, the lack of a difference between rural and urban thermometers would make one feel good about the temperature collecting system. But that initial feeling would be wrong.

One needs to consider several possibilities.1. it might be that the urban heat island effect is small--as Peterson contends.2. It might be that there is editing that went into Peterson's urban stations that cooled them appropriately--in which case the temperatures are correctable.3. It might be that the rural stations he chose have heat problems. He doesn't list what stations he chose. He has a map but no names.

I can't look at the stations he uses because he gives no names, but it is not automatically to be assumed that rural stations are not affected by modern heat producing things. All of the photos shown below are rural stations, 10,000 people or less and all are from Athony Watt's www.surfacestations.org. One can get to the gallery by going to the onlline database.

Urbana, Ohio is a rural station, yet the thermometer is placed on a wall (siting recommendations say the thermometer should be 100 meters away from the buildings--this one is only inches away. And there is the pet air conditioner in the shadows only feet from the thermometer.

St. Ignatius Montana, a very small town, has an air conditioner blowing on its thermometer as well. This is physical lunacy to let the temperature system be this sloppy.

Then there is the town I started my career in, Riverton, Wyoming. It is a town of less than 10,000 yet its thermometer is just feet from 2 air conditioner exhaust fans.

But Newcastle, Wyoming, also quite rural has an air conditioner to heat its thermometer as well.

So, when they tell you that rural (au naturalle) stations are no different than urban stations, beleive them. But know that the reason is not what they tell you. They will tell you that there is no problem with the temperature stream. I will tell you that the rural stations today are being heated just like the urban stations. Think about the fact that today everyone in America has air conditioners and that includes rural people. Just because the station is in a small town setting doesn't ensure that it is giving out the proper temperature.

The entire enterprise of measuring the temperature of the earth is crap because of these problems.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Anytime one compares the temperature history of two nearby towns, they find absurdities which the climatologists simply don't make clear when they speak to the press. Tonight I am going to talk about Chipipewa Lake and Wooster EXP stations. These two towns, about 30 miles apart should be expected to give the same temperature readings, yet, what we find is that they give radically different temperatures. Indeed, if one puts a 180 day running average on the temperature difference one finds that there is a yearly 3 deg F variation in the temperatures between these two towns.

Unlike what I showed with Brookhaven City and Monticello MS, the peak of the temperature difference is in the Fall in 1944 but in the winter in 1945. Why there is this difference I don't know, but note that the variation in the temperature difference between these two towns is about 3x greater than 100 years worth of global warming.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

I always want to start out by pointing out that two closeby towns should, by all considerations, have very similar temperature records. But, as I have found over the past few months, this is not the case. I am taking a second look at Columbus and Seymour, Indiana tonight. Tonight I am looking in detail at the bias between the two towns.

Below is a chart of the temperature difference between Columbus and Seymour (Columbus minus Seymour) for the years 1992-1994.

You can see both wild differences in temperature between the two towns, but you can also see that for the 3 years shown here, in general, Columbus is much hotter than Seymour--by 3 degrees.

Let's look at 1992-1993.

You can see that in the winter of 1992-1993 the bias decreased a bit and then rose again in the spring.

1992 looks like this:

Now, all the above biases are positive. During 1971-1972 the bias was the other direction.

One sees a long stretch of negative biases from 1958 to 1964. Such things do not give great confidence that the temperature is being measured properly.

The incompetence of the weather service, a government agency which may by itself explain the incompetence, continues as I compare the temperature records of towns next-door to each other. One should think that two towns 30 miles apart on the relatively flat Oklahoma Prairie should have similar temperature series. But they don't. Over and over again on this blog, I have shown how bad the temperature records are by showing the lunacies seen in the thermometer record. Two nearby towns should, by all reckoning have no bias and no large temperature differences but, again, over and over I have shown that this is not the case.

Tonight it is again theturn of Okemah and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. I have reported on these stations earlier but I found some new issues in the data. The last time I looked at it I didn't examine the drastic rise in temperature seen in the 1990s. The first picture is of the temperature difference smoothed by a 180 day running average. This allows one to see if the winter temperatures are more divergent than the summer. But in this case, it seems that starting in the mid-1980s Okemah, Oklahoma warmed tremendously compared with Okmulgee. Indeed, the 180 day running average. That warming is amazing. In the late 1990s Okemah became 6 degrees hotter than Okmulgee.

I wanted to examine in detail the bias for a couple of years. I chose 1994 and that is the plot below. At that time Okemah was 3.9 deg F hotter than Okmulgee.

So, what is going on in Okemah that isn't going on in Okmulgee? Well,linking up to Anthony Watts site www.surfacestations.org and going to their gallery I found that Okemah's thermometer is surrounded by buildings, running school buses, and next to cement. That is the picture below.

But Okmulgee's thermometer doesn't seem to have much in the way of heat sources nearby. There is a building 75 meters away but it is much further away than are the buildings in Okemah. And that may be why Okemah heats and Okmulgee doesn't.

This case illustrates that just becausee a thermometer is in a rural area it isn't automatically a good station. Look at this data and realize that it goes into the calculation for global warming. Given the existence of a homogeneity filter, I bet that the editing tilts Okmulgee to be hotter than it is (search this blog for homogeneity).

The early 60s were rightfully times of much discontent in Mississippi as the civil rights movement corrected the ills of southern society at that time. But it was also a time when the weather service seriously mismeasured the temperatures. As in my last post, I am looking at Brookhaven City and Monticello MS. These two towns are 20 miles apart and their temperature record, which is used in global warming studies looks like the picture above shows a clear offset of warming towards Brookhaven City being hotter. The average temperature difference between these two towns for these years is 2.1 deg F.

But what is fascinating is the pattern that gives rise to that bias. Every winter, Brookhaven City is warmer, often by more than 10 degrees. There can be only one cause of this, so far as I can tell--it is that the thermometer at Brookhaven City is next to an heat source, a strong heat source. I dont' know what it is but it doesn't have the same effect in the summer as it does in the winter months.

This is being added about 20 minutes after I posted the above. I looked at the years 1960-1966 and the same phenomenon is there. but it isn't always constantly biased in favor of Brookhaven City. Sometimes Monticello is much warmer. Do we have two heaters which are not in sync, not on at the same time affecting the winter temperatures in both towns? Has anyone seen this pattern before?

But many in the global warming community never ever actually look at the raw data but they, merely, like good little girls and boys, sit down and believe the stories they are told. All is well; don't look at the man behind the curtain; beleive, beleive beleive. . .

Friday, September 4, 2009

Here is another example of closely spaced cities which should have very similar temperatures but don't. Brookhaven City, MS and Monticello MS are only 20 miles apart. The first picture is of the 365-day running average of the temperature difference. You can see that in the early 1960s, the temperatures between the two towns was, on average 2.46 deg hotter in Brookhaven City than in Monticello. That is an astounding temperature difference.

The average of 2.46 hides the horrible temperature differences seen at times during the early 1960s. The second picture is of the temperature difference between these two cities.

But, by 1985 things had reversed. Now Monticello was hotter than Brookhaven City for several years. The last picture is from Aug-Sept. 1985.

Clearly the many many examples of this kind of crap in the weather record shows how abysmal climatologists are at actually measuring the temperature. I don't know what they are measuring but it isn't the real temperature.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

While tooling around the government sites on the web I ran across a fascinating study of roof top heat in "Global Climate Change in the United States."source I ran into the following statement of heat on roof tops.

"The City of Chicago has produced a map of urbanhotspots to use as a planning tool to target areas that could most benefitfrom heat-island reduction initiatives such asreflective or green roofing, and tree planting.Created using satellite images of daytimeand nighttime temperatures, the mapshows the hottest 10 percent of both dayand night temperatures in red, and thehottest 10 percent of either day or nightin orange.The City is working to reduce urbanheat buildup and the need for airconditioning by using reflective roofing materials. This thermalimage shows that the radiating temperature of the City Hall’s“green roof” – covered with soil and vegetation – is up to 77°Fcooler than the nearby conventional roofs.411

411 Several different city of Chicago analyses have substantiated thefinding of up to 77 degree difference – for example, see City ofChicago, Department of Environment, Undated: City Hall RooftopGarden. [Web site] tal/portalDeptCategoryAction.do?deptCategoryOID=-536889314&contentType=COC_EDITORIAL&topChannelName=Dept&entityName=Environment&deptMainCategoryOID=-536887205>http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/climate-impacts-report.pdf

Being curious, with an ability to connect things, I immediately thought of Baltimore, Maryland's temperature station on a rooftop.

Yes, the incompetent weather service does indeed measure the temperature in places that might be, oh, maybe, 77 deg F too hot!. Being above the rocks it is most certainly less than that but it will still be far too hot. Yet this USHCN station is supposed to be one of the better stations for use in global warming studies. Yeah right.

Keeping that in mind, I dug around the Chicago web site and found this.

"On August 9, 2001, at 1:45 pm, when the temperature was in the 90's, the following measurements were obtained: City Hall Roof (paved) 126 - 130°FCity Hall Roof (planted) 91 - 119°FCounty Roof (black tar) 169°FThat's at least a 50°F difference between the garden roof and a black roof!

Note the 113.4 deg F temperature. I tried to look up Chicago's temperature on Aug 8, 2001 but it isn't in the USHCN. So, I looked at Aurora Illinois, just a few miles away. Its maximum temperature was 96 F on that day. Reuters says that the Chicago temperature 'flirted' with 100, meaning it wasn't 100, yet, the roof top temperature was above 100 F, it was 13 deg hotter than 100!

From Anthony Watts' site here is Santa Ana, CA's thermometer, on the roof top as well. Of course, the usual apologetical excuses will be given the by the AGW crowd, that this doesn't really matter--nothing ever does to true believers.

Surely the 7.5 deg rise in temperature in Santa Ana California has nothing what so ever to do with the thermometer on a hot tin roof--that doesn't matter, does it AGW ideologues?

About Me

I have had 39 years experience looking for oil and gas around the world, from Scotland, to Algeria, to the East Coast of the United States, South Texas, West Texas, the Rocky Mountain region, Alaska and China. I have found 33 oil fields and drilled my share of dry holes. The various positions held by me include: Manager of Geophysical Training for a major oil Co., Chief Geophysicist for a small independent oil company, Geophysical Manager - Onshore Gulf Coast, Geophysical Manager--Gulf of Mexico and Chief Geophysicist for China , Manager Geophysics for the US Offshore, Geophysical Manager for the North Sea, Director of Integrated Technology, Director of Exploration for China with a large independent oil company and lived in Beijing China. I speak Mandarin (not fluent but able to communicate). Currently I have my own geophysical consulting firm, living in Houston